transience grounded in decomposition

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Monthly Archives: June 2017

my listening to David Whyte speak
through the laptop speaker
from a youtube video,
is truncated by the strokes of my knife on the cutting board
slicing through a sweet potato

we shape ourselves to fit this world

and i pause to better hear

and by the world are shaped again

and even though i have never heard his voice before, i can hear my voice in his voice, and what he is saying sounds all too familiar because i
had been the one who recited his poem
for a small open mic, in a library overlooking a lake surrounded by white pines
just in the spring.

how I am struck
with tenderness towards the
arrangement of objects
that i’ve just arranged on the
small white shelf of a
small white bookcase,
as i step back to look at how it appears from
further away

–

a bell, a glossy brown seed of a lucuma fruit, a rusty metal figurine of kokopelli, a watercolor of a purple cloud, a letter, handkerchief, poem, feather, harmonica, a shell

–

how i am looking at the list I made four days ago: things/ways to make a home,
feeling good that i had done many (if not all?) of the things i had written in just a few hours, but wondering if they are actually enough

–

make some kind of arrangement of sentimental objects write every night arrange special lighting (candles?)(good lamps) have a meditation spot/writing spot hang up poems/ art ferment some vegetables

–

the way the tiniest piece of dried sage
burns in the new room
in the new house
and i gently wave it around the scattered piles of clothes whose places i haven’t yet found

when i decide that the (once in two years) (its been a long time) lunch date with c just isn’t enough hangout time on this brilliant weather day, so when she asks want to come sailing with me and my brother? i say

yes

–

it would be different if one of us was very big, n says but we’re not , as we decide to go out on the water together this time, three of us on the littlest sail boat i have ever seen that he had just taken down from the roof of his (small) car and assembled in the sand, with the help of a red-faced pot-bellied jet-skier

–

i am wearing a pair of c’s boxer shorts that we find in the heap of a closet /otherwise known as the back of her car, (leftover from her latest move from nola), since i mistakenly didn’t come prepared for this adventure

–

watching the south bound amtrak train glide past us on its tracks along the river, noticing how small and peaceful it’s giant loud machinery looks from my new vantage point on the water

–

talking to the baby seven weeks! the way i would talk to an adult while c is bouncing her to soothe the cryingsleep is your best option

identifying the pain in my right leg as
a bruised adductor muscle, (or strained or pulled) but not identifying where it came from, (the pain) only aware of the aching that this morning
extends all the way to my ankle.

–

walking,(limping) with s to the store and when we’re about half-way there is an explosion of thunder and the rain plummets down. is this okay? she asks and we both just smile, shrug our shoulders, and keep walking, occasionally singing my favorite new song that i learned over the weekend.

–

after most of the storm has passed, we are on our way home splashing through puddles in sandals for the first time this season, feeling the warm puddle water on our feet and the cool rain still dropping on our heads.

driving to dance with ar
letting all of the other cars pass us as we slowly climb up a giant hill,
re-listening to a segment of the podcast On Being, when Krista Tipett interviews Brian Greene about quantum physics and the Higgs Boson particle, (which I had never heard of before today)

the part when Brian Greene describes how any elementary particle gains mass only through interaction– the burrowing through an invisible web surrounding us all of the time –Higgs field , and i can’t help but whoop because it seems particularly spiritual and based in relationships, and similar to the conversations I had last year with kichwa- lamista people in the high amazon of peru,
in not so many words.

–

swinging barefoot on the sticky floor of the dance hall, taking advantage of any natural pause in the music to wipe the sweat off of my face with my dress sleeve

in the dream there are a lot of people on the dock and we are about to get on a raft.
we are told that there is a forty percent chance of capsizing, but we are going anyway, and i am worrying about which part of the journey to prepare for – the beginning or the middle or the end – and so with five minutes to spare i decide to run back to get my tall green muck boots,
but before i sprint off, i point to a large quiet man in the crowd who is wearing suspenders and dark denim work pants and i whisper to the people next to me, ‘see, he’s our guardian angel’

–

when k and i decide to put on lipstick just to walk up the gravel road in hiking boots and summer dresses to watch the sun set over the lake, and in between catching our breath on the climb up the hill, we sing.

–

the feeling of alive that is when wind is gusting over my goose bump skin, just after jumping into cold quarry water, and getting out again
almost fast as i went in.